1: The Civil War as Fought in the West: Was It Different?

Space made for difference.
The critical Civil War campaigns in the East were fought on and near
the 120-mile line between Washington to the north and Richmond and Petersburg to the
south. The western theater, in contrast, demanded marches and railroad and river journeys
of many hundreds of miles. Its vast extent of space principally differentiated the West
from the East. Its distances posed immensely more daunting logistical perplexities for
campaigns of subtle and adroit maneuver. The sheer extent of Western space tended to
distract military commanders from the classical strategic objective, the enemy army, so
that they focused their attention on acquiring and retaining territory.
Thus the West presented both challenges and opportunities for
generalship not to be found in the East. As the Civil War unfolded, however, almost every
commander North and South became so focused upon the challenges of vast space that
grasping the West's opportunities faltered. Only one military commander fully exploited
the West's opportunities for maneuver warfare, and he happened to be a commander of
surprising genius: Major-General, United States Volunteers, Ulysses S. Grant in the
Vicksburg Campaign.
It says much about the differences between theaters of war, moreover, that the same
Ulysses S. Grant, now a lieutenant-general in the Regular Army, general-in-chief of the
U.S. Army,1 and campaigning in the East in 1864-65, failed
to wage maneuver warfare as successfully as he had done in the West. His efforts in the
East to trap General Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia by means
of maneuver foundered, and Grant had to settle for a campaign of brutal trading of
casualties with Lee's army. The geographical scale of the East simply did not offer the
possibilities for deceptive maneuver that Grant had enjoyed in the West.
To be sure, geographical scale alone does not explain the difference between Grant in the
West and Grant in the East. The generalship of R. E. Lee as contrasted, for example, with
that of Lieutenant-General John C. Pemberton had something to do with it. So did that more
mysterious factor, the superior fighting quality of the Army of Northern Virginia as
compared with the Confederate armies beyond the Appalachians, particularly the Army of
Tennessee.2
Moreover, the Eastern theater was not so tiny in contrast to the
Western as to preclude successful maneuver warfare altogether. Lee and Major-General
Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson (from October 10,1862 lieutenant-general)3employed maneuver to devastating effect in the Second
Manassas and Chancellorsville campaigns, albeit on a tactical rather than an operational
or strategic scale; and Jackson's Valley Campaign of 1862, which in fact involved the
whole Virginia theater and was therefore operational in scope, vies with Grant's Vicksburg
Campaign for high rank among all specimens of maneuver warfare. Nevertheless, while it was
in larger part a balance of skills between Grant and Lee that relegated the Virginia
Campaign of 1864-65 to an exchange of bloodletting, the limited possibilities for
deceptive maneuver in so constricted an area had much to do with undermining the skills of
both sufficiently to bring about deadlock. The salient difference between West and East
remains territorial extent.
That emphasis made, a further introductory note must be offered. The
Western campaigns of the Civil War present to the observer a sometimes spectacular vision
of armies marching and struggling over lands imperial in scale, breathtaking in the sheer
magnitude of the arena. The East, nevertheless, was the more crucial theaterbecause
only there might the war have been won or lost quickly. The very size of the West meant
that triumphs there for either side required time for their effects and implications to be
felt fully. In the East, in contrast, either side's loss of its capital city might have
had a rapidly decisive impact. Both sides were right to deploy usually their biggest
armies in front of Washington and Richmond, and try to dispatch their best generals to the
East. It was when the main Eastern Confederate army surrendered at Appomattox Court House
on April 9, 1865, that the Confederacy had surely lost the war, notwithstanding the
existence of other Confederate armies still in the field. Because of its political,
psychological, and economic significance, the East was strategically more important than
the West.
To say that is by no means to deny, however, the cumulative effects of
the North's generally superior record in piling up victories in the West: the denial to
the Confederacy of geographically critical Kentucky with its Ohio River boundary
potentially constricting the North, through Grant's February 6 and 16, 1862 amphibious
victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson; the stripping away from the Confederacy of much
of the granary state of Tennessee and the Nashville industrial complex through Union
exploitation of those same victories and their confirmation at Shiloh on April 6-7, 1862;
Union Navy Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut's capture of the Confederacy's greatest
seaport and largest city, New Orleans, as early as April 25, 1862; the threat to cut the
Confederacy in two and deprive its East of the resources and European imports from the
Trans-Mississippi West posed by the combination of the loss of New Orleans with the June
6, 1862 loss of Memphis; the flat failure of General Braxton Bragg's effort to reverse
many of those losses with his northward march through Tennessee and Kentucky in the late
summer and early autumn of 1862; Grant's fulfillment of the potential raised by New
Orleans and Memphis when his capture of Vicksburg on July 4, 1862, combined with the
Confederate surrender of Port Hudson, Louisiana, on July 9, accomplished the bisecting of
the Confederacy; the second bisection, cutting the Confederate East in turn in two,
achieved by the Union campaign from Nashville through Chattanooga to Atlanta and thence to
Savannah. All these efforts amounted to the severing of limbs from the Confederacy and its
reduction to the condition of a paraplegic, even if the ultimate blow to the heart and
brains had to be struck in the East.
When the war in the East was stagnating under the irresolute leadership
of Major-General, United States Army, George B. McClellan and Union morale was apparently
plummeting into abyss during the winter of 1861-1862, it was Brigadier-General, United
States Volunteers, Ulysses S. Grant who rescued the public spirit of the North. He
provided one of the first substantial strategic triumphs of the war (after McClellan's
western Virginia campaign of the spring of 1861 and naval and amphibious victories on the
Atlantic coast) with his capture of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on
the Cumberland. Grant's credit must be shared with his theater commander, Major-General,
U.S.A., Henry Wager Halleck of the Department of (the) Missouri. Halleck also wished to
exploit the opportunity presented by possible Union Army cooperation with Union Navy
gunboats operating on the rivers that flowed from deep within the Confederacy, to lop off
from the South a considerable segment of Tennessee. Grant pursued the opportunity,
however, much more aggressively than Halleck would have done, in fact provoking the
latter's jealousy in the process.
When bombardment by Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote's gunboats promptly
opened Fort Henry to Grant's troops on February 6, Grant almost immediately, on February
11, began marching his troops the eight miles eastward overland to Fort Donelson, when
Halleck would have paused to refit and reconnoiter. Foote's vessels of course went the
longer way via the Ohio River, but after Grant had begun investing Donelson on the 12th,
the gunboats arrived as early as the 14th to conduct a bombardment. Donelson
was better designed and gunned than Henry and repulsed the naval attack. The next day,
however, Grant responded to the nighttime escape of part of the Confederate garrison and
an attack on his investing lines by sending his own troops forward, forcing the
Confederate surrender on February 16. The Confederates had no further fortification of
consequence short of Nashville on the Cumberland and Corinth, Mississippi near the
Tennessee River; Grant's victories opened the way to the later Union movement into the
Deep South.4
Grant in fact led Halleck's principal field force up the Tennessee
River all the way to Pittsburg Landing, only eight miles from the Mississippi state
border, pushing his vanguard south and west from the landing about two miles to the area
of Shiloh Church. There on Sunday, April 6, the Confederate Army of Mississippi under
General Albert Sidney Johnson, reinforced for the occasion to about 40,000 men in four
corps, counterattacked hard against Grant's, perhaps slightly smaller, Union Army of the
Mississippi of six divisions.5
The Confederates had begun the war in the West by applying President
Jefferson Davis's favored strategy of defense, a military posture in accord with the
political position of the Confederacy that it was attempting only to defend Southern
rights. There were a few exceptions to the defense strategy, notably Major-General
Leonidas Polk's foray from Tennessee to capture Columbus, Kentucky on September 4, 1861,
which had the counterproductive effect of strengthening Kentucky's adherence to the Union
by casting the Confederates in the role of aggressors against the neutrality of the
Commonwealth.
For the most part, however, the Confederacy in the West had not even
followed President Davis's supposedly preferred method of an active, flexible defense, but
under Albert Sidney Johnson had settled for a passive cordon defense across the
approximately 400-mile east-west length of Tennessee and Kentucky, from the Appalachian
Mountains on the east through Bowling Green, Kentucky, and Forts Donelson and Henry in
Tennessee, on to Columbus, Kentucky, on the Mississippi River. Johnston never had enough
troops for a plausible defense of his long frontier, but the very magnitude of the
distance involved appears to have undone the strategic judgment of an officer whom many
Southerners considered their best. Against hypnotically wide space, Johnston could think
of nothing better, until Grant punctured the Confederate cordon at Henry and Donelson.
Then Johnston felt obliged to retreat into Alabama and Mississippi, but spurred by
humiliation at the hands of Grant, a supposed drunken failure in the prewar Army, the
Confederacy's best general gathered the reinforcements that on the first Sunday of April
emerged from the woods around Shiloh Church to attack Grant's camps. The collapse of
cordon defense across wide spaces had propelled Johnston through desperation into headlong
assault.6
Grant's wartime career thus far had already been one of exemplary
tactical skill as well as aggressiveness, but he was not yet a complete military
commander. He allowed Johnston's counter stroke at Shiloh, so different from that
officer's previous behavior, to take him by surprise. He had thrown forward no adequate
reconnaissance to warn him should the enemy approach. He had not sited his divisional
camps for defense, let alone prepared any protective works. Johnston quickly sent Grant's
forward divisions into a retreat that sometimes approached the condition of a rout.
Fortunately for the Union, however, Johnston again gave the lie to his lofty reputation by
botching the attack, conducting it in column of corps, four corps advancing in succession
along the entire width of his front. This odd formation assured the rapid mixing of units
with each other and a degeneration of command and control. Attempting to remedy this chaos
of his own making, Johnston fell mortally wounded while rallying his troops like a company
commander.
Still more fortunately for the Union, Grant, though surprised, proved
imperturbable, and he spent the day gathering together both fugitives and unbroken units
to cobble up a new and solid defensive line on the bluffs above Pittsburg Landing. As the
day was ending, Grant's reformed line brought the tired Confederates up short. With the
Union gunboats Tyler and Lexington firing from the river into the
Confederate right flank, and with the Union reinforcements from Major-General, U.S.V., Don
Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio beginning to disembark at Pittsburg Landing, the new
Confederate commander, General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, decided he must retreat
to Corinth, a decision confirmed by heavy pressure from Grant and Buell on April 7.7
After the aggressive spasm of Shiloh, the Confederates reverted to a
defensive posture in the West, around the important Corinth rail junction where the
Memphis and Charleston Railroad running west and east crossed the north-south Mobile and
Ohio Railroad. On the Union side, Grant's defensive stubbornness had saved the day at
Shiloh, but he could not immediately return to his customary aggressiveness, because
Halleck as department commander came down from St. Louis to take the field leading the
combination of Grant's field force, Buell's Army of the Mississippi, and Major General, U.
S. V., John Pope's army of the Mississippi which had been campaigning directly along the
Great River. Halleck now had over 100,000 men to face only about half that number under
Beauregard, but he settled into a siege of Corinth lasting more than a month, from April
29 to June 10, ending with Beauregard's abandonment of the place and escape.8
Thereafter Halleck dispersed his armies across nearly as wide a front
as Albert Sidney Johnston had held earlier, suggesting that Halleck too felt distance as a
weight rather than offering opportunities to exploit. Union troops ranged from the
Mississippi River to central Tennessee, whence Buell undertook railroad-rebuilding
operations toward Chattanooga way off in the state's southeast corner. At this juncture
Halleck's share of the credit for success as theater commander earned him a train ride to
Washington to become general-in-chief of the Armies of the United States.9
Halleck's post-Corinth dispersal of resources surrendered the
initiative to the enemy and permitted the Western Confederacy a second spasm of offensive
action on the model of the march to Shiloh. While Buell and the Army of the Ohio tied
themselves up in painstaking railroad chores, General Braxton Bragg, commanding the
Confederate Army of Tennessee, bypassed him to hasten northward, recapturing much of
central Tennessee. Major-General Edmund Kirby Smith of the Confederate Department of East
Tennessee simultaneously marched north, to converge with Bragg in northern Kentucky. To
compound the revived Confederate offensive threat, Major-General Earl Van Dorn and
Sterling Price with the former's Army of the West and additional troops marched toward
Corinth and nearby Iuka, where Grant commanded the portion of the Union forces extending
in a quarter-circle south and east from Memphis.
It is not surprising that the stubborn Grant repulsed Van Dorn and
Price in the battles of Iuka (September 19) and Corinth (October 3-4). Probably the most
noteworthy tactical feature of these contests was that Grant's subordinates missed
opportunities he had set up to destroy the enemy army. Without Grant on the scene, the
outcome in Kentucky was less assured. Still, Buell conducted a reasonably vigorous chase
across central Tennessee and Kentucky to interpose between Bragg and Louisville. Then the
rival armies engaged in desultory battle at Perryville on October 8, neither principal
commander showing impressive energy nor bringing his full strength into the contest.
Nevertheless. Bragg perceived his chances for any major success in Kentucky as
intercepted, and he retreated, taking his Army of Tennessee back into its namesake state
and eventually to Murfreesboro on Stones River south of Nashville.10
This ebbing of the second Confederate offensive tide in the West set
the stage at last for the great campaign of the Western theater, the one campaign in which
a commander saw the extensive space of the West not primarily as territory to be won,
held, or lost, but as an offer of inviting prospects for maneuver warfare. Grant's repulse
of the Iuka-Corinth phase of the Confederates' late 1862 counteroffensive, combined with
the removal of Halleck's cautious supervision from the immediate vicinity to distant
Washington, freed Grant to concentrate the bulk of his Army of the Tennessee,11for the extension of his Henry-Donelson-Shiloh campaign
southward down the Mississippi River. His object was the capture of the fortress city of
Vicksburg, situated on high bluffs commanding the river. In Union hands, Vicksburg would
make possible the almost certain capture of lesser Confederate posts farther downstream,
thus opening the entire length of the Mississippi River to Union navigation, and nearly
breaking communication, particularly the transport of supplies, between the
Trans-Mississippi West and the remainder of the Confederacy.
Vicksburg represented, however, not only a major strategic prize, but
also major operational and tactical difficulties for an assailant. Its location on
precipitous hills not only protected it from assault directly out of or across the river,
but its hill system also extended to the north to Haines's Bluff, Synder's Bluff, and the
Walnut Hills similarly barring an approach from out of the Chickasaw Bayou system of
tributaries of the Mississippi. Moreover, Chickasaw Bayou was only the nearest swampy area
to Vicksburg of a triangle of waterways and wetlands, the Mississippi Delta region
extending at various places then, twenty or thirty miles eastward from the main channel of
the Mississippi for almost a hundred miles northward, almost to Memphis. There was dry
ground relatively unimpeded by high bluff from which to approach Vicksburg east and south
of the town and its fortifications, but there was no readily apparent way to reach the dry
ground from the north.
To demonstrate the latter point, Grant's first attempt against
Vicksburg foundered upon the most evident obstacle to an approach toward the dry ground
from the north. In the late autumn of 1862 Grant began moving his main field force of
about 42,000 men down the rail lines from Memphis toward Jackson, Mississippi, whence to
approach Vicksburg from the east while using the rails to keep his army supplied. The
evident obstacle was the problem of guarding a lengthening railroad umbilical cord against
Confederate raiders. While Grant was at Oxford, Van Dorn with 3,500 mounted troops on
December 20 struck his secondary base at Holly Springs on the Mississippi Central
Railroad, destroying some $1,500,000 worth of supplies. Van Dorn then gobbled up other
posts in the vicinity. Meanwhile Major-General Nathan Bedford Forrest broke up some sixty
miles of track of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad north of Jackson, Tennessee, injuring the
ability of the North to support Memphis itself.12
Meanwhile Grant had attempted to exploit Western distances for aiding
deceptive maneuver by sending Major-General, U.S.V., William Tecumseh Shermana close
friend as well as principal subordinate since Shiloh  southward by way of the
Mississippi River itself. Sherman had 32,000 troops from the District of Memphis to
attempt an assault on Haines's Bluff in the Walnut Hills north of Vicksburg from Chickasaw
Bayou. Grant's hope was to force sufficient dispersal of force upon Lieutenant-General
John C. Pemberton, since October 13 commanding the Confederate Department of Mississippi,
Tennessee, and East Louisiana, so that one of the Union expeditions would succeed. But
neither expedition did. On December 27-29 Sherman failed in head-on assaults.13
Grant himself now became the victim of an ill-conceived Union dispersal
of forces. Major-General, U.S.V., John A. McClernand was a Democratic politician from
Illinois. In October he had persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to authorize him to
conduct his own operations on the Mississippi River in exchange for his carrying out a
major Midwestern recruiting drive from which he would largely form his force. After
McClernand's recruits gathered at Memphis, some of them were scooped into Sherman's
Vicksburg expedition. McClernand traveled to Chickasaw Bayou to meet them, took command by
virtue of seniority over Sherman, and at the latter's suggestion embarked his own and
Sherman's men back upriver to attack Fort Hindman at Arkansas Post fifty miles up the
Arkansas River.
In attacks from January 4 to 12, 1863, Fort Hindman was subdued; but
Grant, unaware that the idea for the Arkansas expedition had come from his friend Sherman,
and regarding it as an unwarranted sideshow, extracted from General-in-Chief Halleck
reassurance that McClernand fell under his own, that is Grant's, command. Halleck, though
not always well disposed toward Grant, was much less tolerant of political generals like
McClernand who behaved like loose cannons.14
Grant then organized the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Army Corp, out of
McClernand's and Sherman's troops. With these formed plus the Seventeenth and eventually
the Sixteenth Corps, Grant resumed his own Vicksburg Campaign. The winter of early 1863
was unpropitious because it was excessively wet and the waterways and waterlogged ground
of the Mississippi Delta were even more difficult for troop movements than usual. Grant,
however, was characteristically determined not to let his soldiers lose their stamina and
fighting edge through idleness. He therefore put them to work on a series of digging
projects and amphibious expeditions to try to create new waterway approaches to Vicksburg
bypassing the bluffs along the Mississippi or linking bayous to come toward the city from
its rear. How much confidence Grant himself felt in these ventures is doubtful. Probably
that was less the point than maintaining activity and avoiding an embarrassing retreat by
his main force all the way back to Memphis.15
In any event, three unsuccessful canal projects west of the Mississippi
joined two equally futile naval expeditions trying to penetrate narrow, twisting bayous to
reach the Yazoo River above and behind the right flank of the Haines's Bluff defenses. By
March 29, however, the weather and its effects had improved enough  particularly,
muddy roads and levees had dried enough  for Grant to mount an utterly serious,
climactic maneuver campaign for Vicksburg. If it failed, the result would be disaster to
the Union.
Grant ordered McClernand with his Thirteenth Corps to open a road on
the west side of the Mississippi River over which the Army of Tennessee could march to a
suitable ferrying place south of Vicksburg. He persuaded Acting Rear Admiral David Dixon
Porter to attempt to run vessels down the river past the Vicksburg batteries at night.
Porter made his first efforts with eight warships and three transports beginning before
midnight on April 16. Though the Confederates lighted fires on the west bank to silhouette
the vessels, all but the transport Henry Clay made it past. All, however, were
riddled with shot. On April 22 six transports and twelve barges tried another run. Five
transports and six barges survived.16
The vessels met Grant at Hard Times Landing on the west shore opposite
Grand Gulf. A six-hour naval bombardment of Grand Gulf on April 29 failed to silence the
Confederate guns there, so Grant shifted his east-shore crossing target twenty miles south
to Bruinsburg, where his troops began an unopposed landing on April 30. The garrison of
Grand Gulf hastened to interrupt the landing operation, but, on May 1, McClernand's
vanguard brushed the Confederates aside at Port Gibson. Sherman meanwhile had staged a
feint against his old objective of Haines Bluff. On April 16 Grant had launched Illinois
Colonel Benjamin F. Grierson, with the First Brigade, First Division Cavalry of the
Sixteenth Corps deep into the interior of the state of Mississippi. Leaving from LaGrange,
Tennessee, Grierson's raiders eventually arrived at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on May 2. The
three threats posed by McClernand, Sherman, and Grierson so confused and disturbed
Pemberton that he withdrew his forces into Vicksburg.17
Thus, in short order after the failed experiments that had occupied the
winter months, the daring running of the Vicksburg batteries and adroit maneuvering over a
typically large extent of the Western theater had secured for Grant his first objective on
the way to taking Vicksburg: he was on dry ground on the Vicksburg side of the Mississippi
River, no longer blocked from his main destination by the bluffs and bayous north of the
town. Initially he planned next to join with Union forces farther south to capture Port
Hudson, a hundred miles below Vicksburg, before moving the combined forces on Vicksburg.
But he now learned that the main part of Major-General, U.S.V., Nathaniel P. Banks's Army
of the Gulf had gone not toward Port Hudson but west to the Red River. So Grant decided to
proceed against the Vicksburg citadel with his own Army of the Tennessee.18
His method remained maneuver, but the path on which he embarked struck
almost everyone but himself as even bolder than the running of the batteries. On May 12
the Army of the Tennessee broke away from its base of operations on the river to plunge
eastward into Mississippi. Grant was abandoning his line of communications. The troops
would carry ammunition and medical supplies with them. For subsistence they would depend
on the country through which they marched. Major-General, U.S.A., Winfield Scott had set
the example for Grant in his march to the City of Mexico in 1847, and Major-General,
U.S.V., Samuel R. Curtis had similarly cut loose communications in Arkansas after the
battle of Pea Ridge early in 1862. Still, no modern military commander had successfully
undertaken so formidable a risk in the presence of enemy forces as Grant was now
attempting.19
Grant led 44,000 men. Pemberton had about 30,000 in and around
Vicksburg. Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, head of the Department of the West, was
gathering another force around Jackson, Mississippi, forty-five miles east of Vicksburg.
He had only 12,000 men but the force was capable of growing to a size the Federals could
only guess at. It was to squelch Joe Johnston that Grant moved first. On May 12
Major-General, U.S.V., John A. Logan, at the head of the Third Division of Major-General,
U.S.V., James B. McPherson's Seventeenth Corps, encountered Brigadier-General John Gregg's
Confederate Brigade at Raymond, about fifteen miles southwest of Jackson. Stubborn
Confederate resistance held back the much larger Federal force from late morning to late
afternoon. Sherman's Fifteenth Corps then joined McPherson in pushing toward Jackson. On
May 14 the Federals met Gregg's and Brigadier-General William H.T. Walker's Brigades,
drove them into retreat, and entered the Mississippi state capital about four that
afternoon. Johnston had to retreat.
Johnston had ordered Pemberton to march out of Vicksburg to aid him.
Delaying until May 15, Pemberton chose not to march toward Johnston by any direct route
but to attack southeastward against Grant's line of communications. He was unable to find
any such thing, of course, because it did not exist. He then turned north toward Edward's
Station on the direct route between Vicksburg and Jackson on the Mississippi Railroad,
with a view to uniting with Johnston northeast of there and northwest of Johnston at
Brownsville. Pemberton had wasted too much time, however, for he found that Grant had
changed direction and was bearing down on him.20
With some 20,000 men Pemberton took up a defensive position at a
prominent eminence, about seventy-five feet above the adjacent ground, called Champion's
Hill. There on May 16 McPherson's and McClernand's corps, some 29,000Sherman was
still in Jackson, destroying any property useful to the Confederatesattacked the
Army of Vicksburg. McClernand failed to do his part promptly and vigorously, compelling
McPherson to deal alone with the enemy's main strength. This he ultimately did with
success, after several hours of seesaw fighting and back-and-forth captures of the hill.
He drove the Confederates away toward Vicksburg.21
The next day Pemberton's rear guard waited with 4,000 men and its back
to the Big Black River, hoping to be rejoined by Major-General William W. Loring's
Division which had become separated in the retreat from Champion's Hill. The Federal
vanguard quickly routed the detachment, taking over 1,700 prisoners and eighteen guns in
about an hour's fighting. The Confederates destroyed the railroad and road bridges when
they retreated, but by next morning the Federals were nevertheless crossing on their own
bridges. Before day's end, Grant's army was investing Vicksburg, and reaching out with its
right to reestablish contact with Admiral Porter's vessels north of town, thus reopening
an avenue of communication and supply.
Vicksburg was doomed. Grant worried about Joe Johnston roaming and
raising reinforcements in his rear, and so on May 19 and again on May 22, he tried to
hasten fate by hurling all three of the corps he had on the scene, the Thirteenth,
Fifteenth, and Seventeenth, against Pemberton's elaborate, well prepared defenses. The
assaults failed, but the second of them was prolonged at excessive cost because McClernand
falsely reported that he was about to break through. The latter episode precipitated the
departure of the troublesome Illinois politician at last, with Grant replacing McClernand
on June 19, with Major-General, U.S.V., Edward O. C. Ord.
Grant had to settle down to a siege, but his worries about Johnston
were needless. While Richmond was able to reinforce Johnston to about 30,000, Washington
strengthened Grant to 71,000, including sending him the First and Second Divisions of
Major-General, U.S.V., John G. Parke's peripatetic Ninth Corps from the Department of the
Ohio, the corps having fought earlier on the North Carolina coast and at Second Bull Run
and Antietam. By mid-June, Johnston had abandoned hope of rescuing Pemberton.22
Starvation and accompanying sickness stalked Vicksburg, afflicting the
civilian population as well as rendering about half of Pemberton's soldiers unfit for
duty. Union artillery continually rained shells on the city, sending the citizenry like
the soldiers into sheltering caves dug into the bluffs. On June 28 Admiral Porter informed
Grant that two Confederate deserters said only six days' rations remained. The
Confederates intercepted Porter's signal to this effect and thus became aware that Grant
knew their condition. As Grant prepared for another assault on July 6, he and Pemberton
met on July 3 to discuss surrender terms. Perhaps hoping to get a better bargain by
yielding on the national holiday of the United States, Pemberton agreed that at 10 a.m. on
the Fourth of July he would capitulate. Rather than bear the expense and effort of dealing
with thousands of prisoners, and perhaps the better to circulate distress through the
South, Grant agreed to parole Vicksburg's garrison and let Pemberton's men go home until
exchanged.23
Pemberton surrendered 2,166 officers, 27,230 enlisted men, and 115
civilian employees, along with 172 canon and 50,000-60,000 muskets and rifles.24From Port Gibson on May 1 until July 4, Grant's losses were
1,514 killed, 7,395 wounded, and 453 captured or missing, a total of 9,362, of whom more
than half, 5,630, were lost at Champion's Hill and in the assault of May 22.25 Without fighting a single battle on the scale of a Shiloh
or a Gettysburg, but by relying instead on mystifying maneuver  particularly by
breaking free from his line of communication - and assisted by Western distances in
abetting mystification, Grant had achieved the opening of the Mississippi River and the
bisecting of the Confederacy. Port Hudson surrendered on July 9 when the news of
Vicksburg's fall arrived. In its ratio of low costs to rich rewards, the Vicksburg
Campaign was one of the great campaigns of maneuver in all military history. Grant
received an appropriate reward in a major-generalcy in the Regular Army to date from July
4, 1863.26
Vicksburg helped Union Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to prod
Major-General, U.S.V., William S. Rosecrans to resume activity with his Army of the
Cumberland in central Tennessee. There Rosecrans had found excuses to remain idle since
securing a narrow margin of victory over Braxton Bragg at Stones River or Murfreesboro on
December 31, 1862, and January 2, 1863. Indeed, Rosecrans answered the Secretary's
prodding with success enough to amaze all concerned. As if inspired by Grant, he also
exploited space to achieve perplexing maneuver, so befuddling Bragg as to pry his way into
the important railroad junction of Chattanooga on September 9. Like Grant, Rosecrans
reached a major strategic objective without having to fight a major battle.27
Among those evidently awed by Rosecrans'success was that general
himself, who let his accomplishments go to his head, concluding that Bragg and the
Confederate Army of Tennessee were no longer effective opponents, and marching
incautiously from Chattanooga into northwest Georgia toward Atlanta. The mountains of this
area separated Rosecrans'army into separate columns beyond convenient mutual supporting
distance. Bragg found in this circumstance a tonic to bring him rapid recovery from the
funk into which Rosecrans's recent maneuver had driven him. Bragg turned quickly and
nearly gobbled up several of Rosecrans's columns. It was mainly almost incredible
uncooperativeness from Bragg's subordinateshe had an acerbic temper and was highly
unpopularthat saved the Union Army of the Cumberland.28
In the nick of time Rosecrans reassembled his columns along West
Chickamauga Creek. There Bragg struck the Federal battle line on September 19 with his
army reinforced by Major-Generals Lafayette McLaws's and John Bell Hood's famous and
formidable Divisions of Lieutenant-General James Longstreet's First Corps of the Army of
Virginia, brought West by railroad from the East. Fortunately for the Confederates, on the
second day of a hitherto indecisive battle, an assault headed by Longstreet struck a gap
that misunderstood orders had created in Rosecrans's line. Much of Rosecrans's army, along
with the commanding general, fled in near-panic back to Chattanooga. Major-General,
U.S.V., Gordon Granger who had marched to the sound of the guns, held firm at Chickamauga
long enough to permit the final phase of the retreat to be orderly, and defenses became
well enough prepared to prevent Bragg from reoccupying Chattanooga.29
Nevertheless, Bragg was able to lay siege to Chattanooga and for a time
to threaten a Vicksburg in reverse by nearly starving the garrison. He cut the town's
direct railroad connections with the North and compelled Rosecrans to rely on wagon
transport across sixty miles of mountainous terrain and muddy roads from Stevenson,
Alabama. The wagons required eight days to traverse the distance, and such horses as did
not break down on the way - which many did - tended to consume almost as much supply
tonnage as they could haul.30
By the autumn of 1863, however, the military might of the Union was too
formidable to allow such difficulties to persist. That formidability included the military
brain of U. S. Grant. The Lincoln government responded to the Chattanooga emergency by
sending reinforcements from the East and the further West, and on October 16 the War
Department put Grant in charge of relief operations as commander of the Military Division
of the Mississippi. Grant was allowed to replace Rosecrans with George Thomas as chief of
the Army of the Cumberland.31
To trump the Confederate reinforcements from Longstreet's Corps, the
Federal Eleventh and Twelfth Corps traveled by rail from the Army of the Potomac, arriving
in Tennessee to cooperate with troops from Thomas's army to make sure that the
reinforcements did not simply become more starving mouths. The Federals opened the
"Cracker Line," a much more direct supply route by water and short overland
hauls from Bridgeport on the Tennessee River and across a loop formed by the river near
Chattanooga. Grant's old Army of the Tennessee, now commanded by Sherman, also arrived.32
Grant's theater command notwithstanding, the distances of the West were
destined to nourish no more masterpieces of maneuver warfare like the Vicksburg Campaign
or even Rosecrans's capture of Chattanooga. Grant did not spend enough additional time in
the West before he moved on March 2 and 9, 1864 to a further reward as lieutenant-general,
U.S.A, and general-in-chief of the United States Army.33Meanwhile
circumstances made his last battle in the West a soldiers' battle instead of another
demonstration of genius. Thereafter the distances of the West proved again to undermine
rather than inspire military leadership on both sides.
At Chattanooga itself, Grant, who favored old friends to a fault,
planned to have Sherman strike the decisive blow to break Bragg's line. On November 24
Major-General, U.S.V., Joseph Hooker, who had come west with Potomac troops, mounted a
diversionary attack against Lookout Mountain to the south, using troops from all three of
the main Union armies at hand to drive the Confederates from the shelf midway up the
mountainside that was the military key to the position. The purpose was to distract
Bragg's attention from his opposite, northern flank at the northern extremity of
Missionary Ridge, east of Chattanooga. As it happened, however, Sherman's attack on that
flank bogged down the next day against rough ground just north of a part of the ridge
called Tunnel Hill.
Hooker tried to concoct another diversion on the Confederate south or
left flank, but he was still too far from the main enemy defenses for the effort to be
effective. Grant ordered another diversion in the center, by four divisions of Thomas's
army. These units made Chattanooga a soldier's battle. They were supposed to occupy rifle
pits at the foot of Missionary Ridge, but without orders they went on to charge straight
up the face of the 200-to-400 foot ridge. Contrary to the usual experience of Civil War
frontal attacks, they carried the height with ease. The Confederates, in retreat from the
rifle pits, helped demoralize the defenders farther up, and the guns at the summit had
been poorly sited. Still, the spontaneous charge up Missionary Ridge was one of the most
spectacular events of the whole war, and its sheer audacity and drama helped send the
entire Confederate Army of Tennessee into retreat.34
Grant's move eastward to command all the Armies of the United States
gave Sherman the Military Division of the Mississippi on March 18, 1864. With an
intelligence more incandescent than Grant's, Sherman was not only the inevitable choice to
succeed his friend but he may well have seemed destined for military triumphs as brilliant
as Grant's. In Northern popular estimation by the end of the war and since, that destiny
was fulfilled.35
In truth, Sherman fell short of that high standard, not withstanding
the substantial achievements to which his name became attached. In particular, while Grant
had exploited the geographic scale of the West to enhance his victories, Sherman allowed
that scale to cast a spell upon him that diminished his triumphs. He did not permit the
size of the West to paralyze him as it did some commanders; but he displayed a focus on
territory as an objective that detracted from the clarity of his strategic vision for
winning the war.
Those criticisms apply, with a measure of irony, more to the
accomplishments for which Sherman is best remembered, his famous marches to the sea and
then north through the Carolinas, than to the first phase of his theater command, his
command from Chattanooga to Atlanta. Nevertheless, while Grant, charged now with winning
the whole war not simply gaining a geographic objective such as Vicksburg, ordered the
Army of the Potomac to make the destruction of Lee's army its principal aim, his parallel
orders to Sherman prescribed not only the destruction of the enemy army but also invasion
into the interior of the enemy's country, i.e., the capture of Atlanta. The difference
reflected Sherman's divergence from Grant; Sherman elevated geography to near-equality in
strategic importance with destruction of the opposing force. Surely Grant's orders to
Major-General, U.S.V., George G. Meade in the East might have similarly singled out the
Confederate capital of Richmond as a principal objective along with Lee's army if he had
fully shared Sherman's view; but he did not.36
The differing orders probably help account for Sherman's not grasping
the Confederate Army of Tennessee in daily battle to destroy it with the single-mindedness
that Grant and Meade showed clinging to the Army of Northen Virginia. To be sure, the
skill and strategic vision of Sherman's opponent in the first weeks of the campaign for
Atlanta surely had something to do with Sherman's not progressing as far toward
destruction of the Army of Tennessee in that period as Grant might have wished. Joe
Johnston, back in a major Western command upon taking over the army on December 27, 1863,
proved himself at least Sherman's equal as tactician in the battles southeast of
Chattanooga. He was also unwilling to run the kind of risks of battlefield casualties that
characterized Lee in the East, so he was able to maintain his army substantially intact
against Sherman's superior numbers. Johnston had to yield ground, but he was deliberately
trading space for men and for time. Still, the beginning of the Atlanta campaign displayed
a tendency on Sherman's part to fix his eye not on the main prize, the Army of Tennessee,
but on what should have been a secondary objective, Atlanta.37
The capture of Atlanta on September 2 coincided with severe
deterioration of the Army of Tennessee, less because of Sherman's methods of war than
because Johnston's necessary retreats had exhausted the patience of President Davis and
led him to replace Johnston with John Bell Hood on July 17. The more aggressive Hood,
expected to insure that Atlanta would not fall without a fight, produced plenty of
fighting but also ill-affordable casualties and the loss of the city all the same. He
specialized in headlong assaults that required no tactical genius on the part of Sherman
and his chieftains to repulse, commanding tough veteran soldiers as they did.38
Hood responded to losing Atlanta with better judgment than he had shown
in defending it. He conducted a series of raids on Sherman's supply line from Chattanooga,
the Western and Atlantic Railroad, and he prepared to march northwest beyond Chattanooga
to compel Sherman to move back into Tennessee to defend his long line of communications
through Nashville back to Louisville and Cincinnati. Sherman was paying one of the
penalties of campaigning in the vastness of the West. Already at the outset of the
campaign from Chattanooga to Atlanta, he had felt obliged to employ almost half his troops
to guard the rail lines and supply depots in his rear. Now the length of his supply lines
threatened to paralyze his armies completely.39
His response customarily receives enthusiastic applause. Rather than
remain tethered to a dangerously prolonged line of communications, he decided to follow
the example of Grant in the Vicksburg Campaign and abandon that line, to feed his armies
from the countryside through which they moved. He detached George Thomas and
Major-General, U.S.V., John M. Schofield with enough troops to defend Nashville and
central Tennessee with an army of about 50,000 men. With 60,000 soldiers remaining under
his own direct command, he proposed the subsequently celebrated march from Atlanta to the
sea, subsisting on the countryside as he went, while destroying all property potentially
useful to the Confederacy that he could not consume. He thus visited economic ruination
upon a swath of Georgia sixty miles wide and 120 long and deliberately instilled terror
not only across his immediate path but throughout the entire South as well.40
Here was the apogee of the focus upon land rather than upon the enemy
army as objective that the space of the Western theater encouraged. Sherman's marches to
the sea and subsequently through the Carolinas have been the principal foundation of his
enduring fame, but his strategy of making war not primarily upon the enemy's army but by
way of the vastness of the land upon the enemy's economy and the morale of the enemy
people deserves a reconsideration as to its wisdom.
First, Sherman's strategy allowed even the Confederate Army of
Tennessee in its condition of nearly terminal illness to pose a final danger. Hood
fulfilled his scheme of carrying the war back to central Tennessee and caused Grant and
the Lincoln administration anxious moments lest Nashville return to Confederate
possession, a possibility not conducive to high Northern morale at this late stage of the
conflict. Fortunately General Thomas proved more than equal to the challenge though
leading something of a makeshift army. While he prolonged Grant's uneasiness and provoked
the General-in-Chief's annoyance by cautiously delaying a climactic battle with Hood, when
he did strike in the December 14-15 battle of Nashville, Thomas completed the ruination of
the Army of the Tennessee almost altogether, an unprecedented battlefield accomplishment
in this war. But there remains the question whether Sherman's own departure from Hood's
front produced dividends proportionate to the risks of allowing the Confederate army to
disport itself in Tennessee against a weakened Union foe.41
Sherman's leaving Thomas to deal with Hood so that he himself could
target the enemy's economy and morale has won praise partly because it seemed to offer a
more attractive alternative to Grant's brutal trading of casualties in his 1864-1865
Virginia campaign. Sherman's marches may well have encouraged the receptivity of American
military men in the twentieth century to the theory of independent air power, with the
promise of leaping over battlefields like those of 1861-1865 and 1914-1918 to win victory
expeditiously and with less total loss of life than in confronting the enemy army. By
wrecking the economy and the will of an enemy's people to continue fighting, the argument
has gone, such activities will cause the enemy's armed forces to collapse of their own
weight.
It is easy to assume that because final Confederate defeat followed so
closely upon Sherman's marches, Sherman's strategy aimed at the enemy's economy and morale
contributed importantly to the Union's winning the war. But to accept that idea is, of
course, to commit the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. In fact,
twentieth-century experience with Sherman's strategy, with aerial bombardment rather than
destructive marches as principal means, should cause us to doubt the efficacy of the
marches. We know from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam that against resolute enemies,
attacks on popular morale did not break the will to fight, and that against exceptionally
critical economic targets - such as Germany's petroleum industry in World War II - violent
attacks against the enemy economy have also proven much less fatal then either admirers of
Sherman or prophets of air power would have had us believe. We have learned that violent
attacks against an enemy's homeland, economy, and people can actually encourage a popular
rallying in support of the very government that the attacks are intended to bring down.
By the time of Sherman's marches, the Confederacy was already doomed.
Sherman set out from Atlanta to the sea on November 16, 1864. Lincoln had already been
re-elected for a second term as President of the United States on November 8. Every
intelligent Southerner knew that with Lincoln's re-election, the Confederacy had lost the
war. It would be nearly impossible to hold out against Lincoln for another four years.
Only President Davis's acute sense of duty kept resistance going. Thus, with the Civil War
almost over before Sherman's marches began, we can never know what their effect might have
been had they occurred earlier, when Confederate prospects for continued resistance were
more real.
Might earlier marches have obstructed and delayed Union victory, by
provoking renewed Southern resentment and fear and thus enhancing resistance? As it was,
the resentment the marches generated made Southern acceptance of reunion more difficult
after the war. Southern anger at Sherman obstructed the ultimate object of war,
reunification. Had it not been too late in the war for renewed effective Southern military
resistance, Sherman's marches might have proven immediately counterproductive to the
desired outcome of the war. As it was they were subtly counterproductive through their
effect on Reconstruction and reunion.
Therefore, we should at least consider whether the effects of Western
distance and space on Civil War strategy might have been baleful not only for the
Confederacy, which lacked the manpower to defend Western distances effectively, but also
upon Union strategy except for the strategy of Ulysses S. Grant. Only the one true
military genius who campaigned in the West during the Civil War was able to rise above the
intimidating effects of Western space to exploit that space on behalf of brilliant
maneuver warfare. For all other Western generals Union and Confederate, even William
Tecumseh Sherman, Western space had a distorting impact on strategic thought, hampering
the prosecution of the war. The Western theater's challenge of vast space yielded finally
only to the military genius of Ulysses S. Grant.